Breathtaking Image Reveals The Colossal Magnetic Field of a Distant Spiral Galaxy Spiral galaxies look nice and tidy, with most of their stars and gas confined to a disc neatly arranged in swirling spiral arms. But there's a lot more to a galaxy than what we can see, as a new image of invisible phenomena adroitly demonstrates. The image shows a galaxy called NGC 4217, around 67 million light-years from the Milky Way, viewed edge-on - and pictured amidst a mapped visualisation of the galaxy's vast, complex magnetic field, sprawling out some 22,500 light-years into the space around NGC 4217. Since we don't know much about how galactic magnetic fields are generated and maintained, astronomers are hoping lessons learnt from this new map could be applied to our home galaxy, the Milky Way. "Galaxy NGC 4217 is of particular interest to us," said astronomer and physicist Yelena Stein, formerly of Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, and now at the Centre de Données as...
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